The plan to expand Brown's faculty by 100 is a centerpiece of the Plan for Academic Enrichment. Now nearing the third anniversary of the Corporation's approval of the initiatives, the University is well into the hiring process. The Herald examined how four departments have been affected by the faculty expansion. This, the first article of the series, is an overview of the expansion.
In February 2002, when the Corporation endorsed the Initiatives for Academic Enrichment, a key provision called for the addition of 100 new faculty in "incremental positions" - newly created positions that represent a net expansion of the faculty. Almost three years later, roughly 37 of those positions have been filled, about 25 more searches are underway and a second round of allocations is set to begin next semester, according to Dean of the Faculty Rajiv Vohra P'07.
Vohra said that for an institution as complex as Brown, "the pace at which this change is going on is unusual."
"It's now at the point (when) the plan is not just on paper," he said. "Our faculty size today is higher than it's ever been."
The 100-position expansion represents an increase of 17 percent in the overall size of the faculty, which stood at 577 in the 2001-2002 academic year.
When the initiatives were approved, the administration called on departments to submit proposals assessing their status and goals. Departments were faced with the task of making the case for their share of the incremental positions.
The president and the provost make all final decisions on the allocations of the 100 incremental positions, but they give "enormous weight" to the recommendations of the Academic Priorities Committee, according to Assistant Provost Brian Casey, who staffs the committee. The APC is chaired by the provost and made up of the senior academic deans, the vice president for research and six senior faculty members, elected by the faculty.
It was the job of the APC to evaluate the departmental proposals and "decide where it would be productive for the University to grow," Vohra said.
Both Casey and Vohra said that the APC has made allotments over a wide range of disciplines. According to the Web site of the dean of the faculty, as of September 2004, 32 percent of the incremental allocations went to the life sciences, 29 percent to the humanities, 22 percent to the social sciences and 17 percent to the physical sciences.
Vohra said that though distributing the 100 incremental positions evenly among departments would be the easiest thing to do, "that's not the way to maximize the effect of this."
"One big area of focus was life sciences ... (because) there was a sense that Brown did not have a big a presence as it should," Vohra said.
He said it was very difficult to make decisions among many strong proposals, but "arguments had to be made - cases had to be made - and that's what departments did."
Most "departments took a look at where they were and where they wanted to go" and included "a broader strategic view of (their) field," he said.
According to Casey, the APC met several times a week for more than a year before slowing its pace. It was an "extremely long and extremely arduous process to weigh these potentially competing proposals," he said.
The first round of proposals and hiring has produced a particularly significant surge in interdisciplinary programs.
"What you saw emerge in the first round were faculty looking to do inter-departmental" projects, Casey said. These include the Environmental Change Initiative, the Humanities Center, the Initiative in Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences and the recently approved Program in Commerce, Organizations and Entrepreneurship - all of which are associated with two or more departments. New faculty directors have been hired for both the Environmental Change Initiative and the Spatial Structures Initiative.
This semester the provost called on departments to make a second round of proposals. The APC will collect the proposals and begin to evaluate them in the spring, though "they don't have the same huge task that they had in 2002 and 2003," Vohra said.
"The competition becomes more and more stiff because fewer positions are left," he said.
After an allocation of a position is made, the hiring process is slow and can be unpredictable.
Searches usually take at least a year because ads have to be placed, short lists drawn up and candidates brought to campus, Vohra said. If a department cannot find a high-caliber candidate, searches may be abandoned temporarily.
The Target of Opportunity program, which was created as part of the initiatives and allows departments to bypass the normal search process in order to recruit highly desirable candidates, has played a part in the faculty expansion. Out of the 100 planned additions, 25 spots were allocated to the program and about 12 have been filled, Vohra said.
The initiatives call for continued - but more modest - expansion of the faculty after the 100 incremental additions. According to Casey, the size and nature of that growth will be determined by how the initiatives develop and "how the (capital) campaign develops."
